Tag Archives: aesthetic

Rajiv Trivedi

Several aesthetic discussions have entailed an appropriation of the essential nature of aesthetic judgment / enjoyment. Kantian ‘disinterestedness’ has been examined in numerous possibilities and shades. Such discussion rises partly out of genuine query and partly out of a need to justify aesthetics as a proper discipline. Theorists like Derrida, Barthes – “it is the language that speaks, not the author” – (Barthes 1977, p.143) and others in one sense, side with Indian aesthetics which considers Ras-nishpatti (consummation) in the Rasika (enjoyer) as the culmination point in aesthetic cycle.

It is said that words profane an idea. As our restricted technological advance commits us to human communication through imperfect linguistic expression, we conduct ourselves thus. It is this elasticity of language that accounts for greater use of fuzzy logic in all human affairs. So while most people use this phrase to describe a process in which the direction of brain-drain changes, I use it as an appeal to change the nature of such a drain.

It all began with quantification of human being. For some time, it seemed a good thing as historically, human being had been treated as less than that. But while in the past, it was a product of instinct-based more-barbaric-than-civilized society; in the twentieth century it was a conscious act to place human-beings at certain pre-conceived levels. More than anything else, this century can be adjudged as being consumed with the process of evaluating man. For the first time in his history, man had focused his eyes away from gods and heavens towards his own tiny but real existence.